In the retail food industry, specifically, small grocery stores, delicatessens, restaurants and the like, a great deal of bulk luncheon meats and cheese are sold over the counter which are sliced and weighed according to customer order. The employee must by trial and error manually slice the food and then weigh the same. This usually results in many trips back and forth between the slicing means and the weighing scale before the proper amount of food is sliced. In addition, the employee must stay and operate the slicer in order to fulfill the customer's order. Consequently, a great deal of time is lost in performing this function since the employee could be performing other sales services for the customer if an automatic system existed.
In an effort to solve the problem of interrupting the slicing operation to set the already cut slices down on a scale to verify the weight, slicers have been developed which automatically weigh the sliced product as it is sliced. Thereby eliminating the need for the operator to make trips back and forth between the slicing means and the weighing scale to ascertain the proper weight of the product sliced. However, even with this apparently time saving feature, the operator must still stay at the slicer to either manually slice the food or in the case of an automatic slicer the operator must stay to receive and place the sliced product in a uniform stack.
The prior art automatic slicing systems do not include an efficient and economically feasible device for receiving, weighing and uniformly stacking the sliced product. Moreover, such automatic slicing systems do not include a mechanism for easily varying how the sliced product is stacked, for instance, shingled, fluffed or generally vertically aligned.
Consequently, in the comestible product slicing field, there exists a need for an inexpensive automatic slicing system which can slice, count, weigh and uniformly stack a comestible product. Moreover, there exists a need for such an automatic slicing system which is operator safe and will not cause operator fatigue.
The present invention overcomes many of the disadvantages inherent in the above-described automatic or manual slicing systems by providing an automatic slicing system for slicing a comestible product and forming a uniform stack of the sliced product. The automatic slicing system of the present invention also includes means for simultaneously weighing the sliced product. The automatic slicer of the present invention receives a comestible product, automatically slices and stacks the comestible product until the desired weight is achieved, whereupon the slicer stops and an audible signal is sounded to alert the operator of the completed cycle. The present invention further controls the slicing stroke in accordance with the width of the comestible product and the feed rate in accordance with the difficulty of slicing the comestible product to thereby save overall operating time and achieve uniform slice thickness. Consequently, the automatic slicing system of the present invention is economically efficient, operator safe and reduces operator fatigue. Moreover, use of the present invention results in considerable savings in money as well as time for the over the counter customer ordered cold cut businesses and the like.